Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.

it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

Downstream is always someone else's up.